“Don’t!”
Steam rose from the cold-iron bars as the holy water seared his scarred skin. He held on too long, intentionally letting his palms burn.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he whispered. “It’s not safe.”
Hot tears ran down my cheeks. Every decision we’d made up to this point felt wrong now: the chains coiled around his wrists, the cell doused in holy water, the bars keeping him caged like an animal.
“I know you’d never hurt me,” I whispered.
The words had barely left my lips when Jared lunged at the bars. He grabbed at my throat and I jumped back, his cold fingers grazing my skin as I slipped out of reach.
“You’re wrong about that, little dove.” His voice sounded different, cruel and soulless.
Laughter echoed off the walls and chills rippled through me. I realized what everyone else had known all along.
The boy I knew was gone.
The one caged before me now was a monster.
And I was the one who would have to kill him.
Unless I could find a way to save him.
30. MARKED
The next morning, I holed up in the athenaeum with Faith’s journal, trying not the think about the way his hand had felt around my neck. I knew it wasn’t Jared, but the voice sounded exactly like his, and I kept hearing it.
I lost myself in the journal, skimming over the older more damaged entries until I reached what had to be Faith’s handwriting. The word nightmares jumped out at me, begging me to read.
The nightmares are getting worse. Sometimes I don’t sleep for days hoping to outrun them. But when I finally close my eyes, they’re waiting. I’ve started painting them. Once I complete a painting, the nightmare stops. But a new one always begins. I keep thinking one day, I’ll paint something and it will be over. I will fall asleep that night and I won’t even dream.
I flipped a few pages until I reached another entry.
My dad told me the truth about my specialty today. He saw one of my paintings—a little boy in khaki shorts and a red blazer, lying dead in the street. There’s a symbol carved into his forehead, and a shadowy figure hovering above him. In my dream, I knew it was a demon. I even knew his name.
Azazel.
My hand shook when I saw the demon’s name.
Azazel.
The name of Gabriel’s whip.
At first, Dad seemed shocked by the painting. But he looked proud, as if I’d painted the Mona Lisa instead of a dead kid. Then he showed me the picture in the newspaper. It was my painting—every detail except the shadowy figure.
Invocation and precognition is my specialty.
Dad says invocation is something he can teach me, not that I want to learn to summon and command demons or angels. They seem equally alien, and I don’t want to face either one. But precognition is scarier. It’s a gift, he said. Which means it cannot be taught. If you are one of the “lucky ones,” as he calls them, images come to you. Images of a future that hasn’t happened yet. If the dreams came to him, he’d know there was nothing lucky about them.
I tried to imagine seeing a child’s death before it happened—seeing a photograph of a scene from one of my paintings. It was a miracle Faith didn’t lose her mind and go completely crazy, carrying around that kind of burden with her. I remembered when Lukas, Jared, Priest, and Alara first told me that invocation was my specialty.
When they thought I was one of them.
Faith and I had such similar reactions. The ability to summon, and supposedly command, angels and demons and hadn’t seemed “special” to me either.
It doesn’t matter. You don’t have a specialty.
I turned back to the journal, pushing the thought away.
Last night’s dream was strange. The words came first, which has never happened before. And I even saw a date.
Under the wings of a hawk, a dove will be born.
Not a black dove bound by the ties of centuries past.
But a white dove, born in this one to break the ties that bind us.
And set us free.
July 30th
The recognized the date.
I must’ve read it wrong.
July 30th. My birthday.
The images came later. Alex holding a baby, with a tiny hospital bracelet around her wrist. He’s in the nursery, and I know it’s his baby because I can see the card taped to the isolette: Kennedy Rose Waters. July 30th.
Below the entry, Faith had drawn a simple sketch of a girl, with the snow-white wings of a dove, standing at the edge of a cliff. It reminded me of the painting I was working on when my mom died. A girl standing on a ledge of a building, with gnarled sparrow wings growing out of her back too scared to fly.
But instead of painful, unwanted wings, the girl’s wings in Faith’s drawing were breathtaking and full—the kind of wings that could carry her.
I’m not sure how many times I re-read the page or what shocked me more; knowing Faith predicted my birth down to my name and the day, or the idea that I was the white dove. Faith’s entry made it sound important, as if I had some kind of destiny. Maybe there was still room for me somewhere in my friends’ story.
Later that night, I went to see Jared. But this time, I didn’t go alone.
Elle hugged her parka tighter around her thin frame. “It’s freezing down here.”
Lukas pulled her against his shoulder, and rubbed his hand up and down her arm. “The more powerful the demon, the colder it gets.”
Subzero temperatures couldn’t have prepared me for what waited at the end of the tunnel, inside Jared’s cell. The demon stood in the center of the Devil’s Trap, his arms outstretched like he was soaking in the sun. New scars mixed with the old ones to create a map of pain. Behind him, every inch of the cell was covered in frenzied writing—letters, characters, words, and symbols overlapping or spiraling in circles.
Priest pointed at the script scrawled across the mattress. “That’s Assyrian for sure.”
Gabriel stood at the bars, speechless. “Sumerian. Ammonite. Minoan. Aramaic. We need to know what the hell it says.”
Distorted drawings of monstrous creatures marred the floor: falcon-headed wolves with human limbs, and masked creatures morphing from equestrian bodies, their claws clutching swords and battleaxes.
“Was there anything like this in the book you were reading?” I asked Elle.
Elle looked at me like I was crazy. “What book?”
“The one Dimitri lent you,” I said.
She frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you okay?”
I glanced at Lukas. Maybe she didn’t want him to know.
Alara gasped, pointing at what looked like demonic Morse code.
“Enochian, the language of light and darkness,” Alara said. “Of angels and demon.”
Andras turned his head slowly toward Alara. “Only a witch would use those words to describe the tongue of the Labyrinth.”
She pulled back her shoulders and stepped closer to the bars. “I am not a witch.”
The demon laughed, a hollow and empty sound. “You deal in spells and wards, elements and earth. Your kind met their ends in flames, in both our worlds. But in the Labyrinth, we don’t burn witches at the stake. You set fire to one another. And when your souls have burned to ash, the Dark Prince resurrects them so they can be burned again.” Andras smiled at Alara. “Your grandmother is probably there
right now, burning as we speak. I can almost smell the stench of her soul.”
“My grandmother is not in hell,” Alara snapped.
He cocked his head. “Are you sure?”
Alara slipped the paintball gun from her tool belt, her delicate features contorted with rage.
Priest grabbed her arm, guiding it back down at her side. “He’s just trying to get under your skin.”
She pointed a shaky finger at Andras. “I’m gonna be the one who kills your miserable ass, you hear me?”
“You’re talking about Jared,” I said softly. A fact that didn’t seem to register with her at all.
Alara spun around, her face only inches from mine, and she pointed at the bars. “That thing is not Jared.”
“Let’s calm down.” Gabriel scanned the tunnel for Dimitri. “Andras is the Author of Discords. He tries to incite anger and dissention. We’re giving Andras what he wants.”
“Shut up, Gabriel,” Alara snapped.
The demon walked toward the incomprehensible writing on the wall. As he turned, Jared’s back came into view. Every inch of his skin was covered in the same indecipherable symbols. The drawings themselves weren’t as disturbing as the placement; Jared’s lower back, between his shoulder blades—spots he couldn’t possibly reach with his wrists chained in front of him.
Elle inched closer to Lukas. “We have officially entered The Exorcist territory.”
Footsteps echoed behind us, and Dimitri emerged from the mouth of the tunnel.
“What the hell took so long?” Gabriel demanded.
“I had to add rock salt to the tank. The concentration isn’t strong enough anymore.” Dimitri unzipped a cracked, leather bag and tossed dusty journals and books with crumbling spines on the floor.
“Did you bring the bells?”
Dimitri unearthed a dozen chipped, wide-mouthed bells, suspended from thick loops of rope.
“Bells?” Priest stared at Dimitri, dumbfounded. “That’s your plan?”
Dimitri shoved one into his hands. “These are altar bells, used in some of the most revered churches in history, including the Vatican. He’s getting stronger, and we need to counteract that. The sound will weaken him.”